Bette Davis (6 page)

Predictably, Bette was miserable at Northfield. The seminary girls struck her as vastly inferior to her Newton "smart set." Her sole cohort was her equally disconsolate roommate, Duck Seager, with whom Bette dubbed their cheerless room "Cell 322, Sing Sing.'' From the first, Bette bristled at the Northfield rulebook and the schedules of required prayer meetings and household duties the administration had quickly thrust into her hands. She and Duck mocked the litanies of "We don't do it in Northfield!" with which her every inquiry seemed to be met. Before long, Ruthie wrote to say that she would be stopping off in Northfield the following Thursday after attending a photographers' convention in Swamp-scott, Massachusetts. A determined Bette preserved her mother's postcard in her memory book, along with a notation that perhaps there was some hope left. Indeed, by the time Ruthie's visit was finished, Bette had persuaded her that she and Bobby were far too unhappy in this prison of a school to remain beyond the fall term.

Mrs. Davis informed Northfield Seminary that she was removing Bette and Bobby for "financial reasons,'' and after the winter break the girls transferred to Cushing Academy, a coeducational preparatory school in Ashburnham, Massachusetts. At Cushing, her report card shows, Bette's grades promptly plummeted from the A's

she had earned in Newton to C's. Bette had openly declared that after the rigors of Northfield, she intended to have some fun at Cushing. She lost no time creating a mystique for herself among the Cushing boys by announcing that she already had a steady beau at home.

Much as she dangled the name Gige Dunham before the Cushing boys, she remained flirtatiously noncommittal to Gige himself. At Christmas, when Gige had finally worked up the courage to ask Bette what his chances were with her, she had replied merely that he had as much chance as anyone. As usual, this caused Gige to pour out his heart on his father's company stationery: ' 'If you don't watch out my little Miss / Upon those lips I'll plant a . . ." Gige could hardly bring himself to write the word "kiss," let alone put his threat into action: "You know I wouldn't dare / You'd slap me right across the face / And tell me to go to the hot place.'' As Bette was quick to discover, Gige's quaint inhibitions did not seem to be shared by the boys at Cushing. In Ashburnham, the regular Sunday coed hour allowed young men and women to pair off and stroll about the grounds. Each week, as Sunday approached, Bette fer-vendy prayed for rain. She had learned how useful an umbrella could be on these rainy walks to shield a furtive embrace with a beau.

Although Bette strolled the campus with a number of boys that term and even spent a weekend in Cambridge, where her Prov-incetown boyfriend Jim Allen escorted her to the Harvard Freshman Jubilee, by the evidence of her scrapbook notations there can be litde question that her favorite male companion of the moment was Cushing senior J. Warren Blake, or "Blake," as she called him. Bette encouraged Blake to throw over his previous steady girlfriend, all the while, however, making a great fuss about her own refusal to give up Gige. In due course, like his predecessor the boy poet, Blake inquired where he stood with Bette. And she, with typical coyness, replied that it wouldn't be any fun if she told him.

One evening after chapel, Blake's agonies precluded studying for an English examination die next day. Instead he composed a sighing note to Bette, typical of the many lovesick missives from boys that crowd her scrapbook. Would she tell him that she cared for him just a little? Did she know that she could do what she wanted with him and that he cared for her more than he could tell?

And would she please, please give up Gige?

envisioned Mariarden as a temple of art dance, where barefoot children in flowing white robes might attain the highest phases of being when their bodies had been trained to respond to what Del-sartists called "the movement of the soul." At Mariarden, entree to the highest phases of being was expensive. When Mrs. Davis met with Marie Currier in hopes of enrolling Bette, Ruthie was distressed to discover that she could not afford the tuition. Ruthie anticipated earning only a minimal income that summer taking pictures at the nearby MacDowell Colony for writers, musicians, and artists—not nearly enough to pay for Bette's lessons.

Bette was promptly enrolled instead at Peterborough's lesser, cut-rate school of interpretive dance, the Out-Door Players, whose director, Marie Ware Laughton, offered to waive tuition for Ruthie's daughter in exchange for free photographs of classes and performances. Clad in the Greek tunics that Isadora Duncan had made emblematic of female yearnings, Bette and Miss Laughton's other young nature dancers were out cavorting among the pines one afternoon when several of the girls froze suddenly at die sight of a tall, ethereal female figure in a rippling Oriental robe and jangling gold bracelets. At Mariarden that summer, Mile. Roshanara, the exotic thirty-three-year-old Irish-English "priestess of Burmese dance and health culture" (whose real name was Jane Craddock), had attracted a passionate following for her classes in expressive movement, emphasizing the "natural" use of all parts of the body. As it happened, Ruthie was there taking pictures of Bette and the others when Roshanara introduced herself to Miss Laughton's students and explained that she had come to observe them in search of one or two young dancers with presence and magnetism enough to join her company.

The next morning, much as Ruthie had hoped might happen, a tiny girl whose copious robe and delicate, fluttering motions announced her as a disciple of Mile. Roshanara arrived at the Silhouette Shop, Ruthie's Vine Street photography studio. The child brought a note from Roshanara:

My Dear Mrs. Davis,

Will you be kind enough to come and see me and bring your

daughter Bette, any time after four.

Very faithfully yours, Roshanara

IWelve years after this, in 1937, Bette Davis was rehearsing her on-screen entrance in Jezebel. Director William Wyler sent her

home with the leather riding crop and sweeping black riding habit she was to wear in the scene, with instructions to devise a single large, comprehensive gesture that would instantly define the character of Julie Marsden. In the beautiful cinematic moment that resulted, Bette catches the train of her riding habit with the crop and sweeps it up over her shoulder with a graceful ripple of voluminous black fabric, reminiscent of her 1925 solo dance debut at Mariarden in Roshanara's staging of one of Loie Fuller's famous 1 'serpentine'' numbers.' 'La Loie," as the Illinois-born skirt dancer had been known to a worshipful French public around the turn of the century, had created dazzling abstract effects through the wavelike manipulation of the colorful fabrics in which she draped herself for such signature numbers as the Fire Dance, the Lily Dance, and the Butterfly Dance. With long wands strapped to her arms, Fuller would lash her billowing costumes in the fluid curves and spirals said to express "the higher emotions." So, too, for Bette Davis's debut in the Moth Dance at Mariarden that August of 1925, Bette used long balsam sticks to manipulate the layers of white Chinese silk that hung all about her, in illustration of the classic Delsartean principle on which virtually all interpretive dance was based and by which much of Davis's best screen work would consistently be informed: "Every movement is the manifestation of a thought, an emotion, or a passion."

As Ruthie and Bobby watched Bette dance on a pane of frosted glass underlit to give the effect of flames, in which the Moth finally perishes, they were beside themselves with excitement. Bobby had made Bette's eight-week apprenticeship at Mariarden possible by agreeing to play the piano for a dance class taught by one of Roshanara's disciples in die damp cellar of a church in Keene, New Hampshire, in exchange for free lessons for her sister. But any sacrifices that had to be made were well worth it, or so it seemed to Ruthie, especially when director Frank Conroy, in whose Mariarden production of A Midsummer Night's Dream Bette appeared as one of the Dancing Fairies, declared that it would be a crime if Mrs. Davis didn't put her older daughter on the stage someday. "She has something that you can't buy," he told Ruthie, "something that makes your eyes follow her when she doesn't speak, and when she does, it is just added excitement."

Despite the higher emotions Bette's graceful stage movement expressed so eloquently, the seventeen-year-old's journal entries suggest that her thoughts continued to be preoccupied with more mundane matters: most particularly, the ongoing rivalry between

Blake and Gige. Bette had coyly invited both of them to Peterborough to see her in Mile. Roshanara's production of The Magic Slipper. She had not, however, mentioned to either boy that his fellow sufferer would be there. A heartsick letter from Warren Blake that she received after the calamitous weekend tells all. On the Friday night of Blake's arrival that August, Bette concluded her performance by tossing the magic slipper to him in the audience. Only naturally, Blake interpreted this as a sign of favor. Whatever joy he may have felt at that moment was quickly extinguished later that evening when Bette informed him that Gige was expected the following morning and Blake shouldn't be so dreary as to complain about it. In a burst of jealousy, Blake angrily decamped early the next day. As Bette later gleeftdly recorded in her memory book, at Saturday night's performance she tossed the magic slipper to Gige.

As the summer of 1925 drew to a close, there was little in Bette's scrapbook to indicate that she shared Ruthie's fierce ambition for her to become an artist. Although Bette had savored the praise and attention her dancing attracted at Mariarden, and while she dutifully preserved the autographed picture Mile. Roshanara had given her along with some vague words about Bette's possibly becoming one of her disciples in the near future, with September's approach Bette seems to have been infinitely more excited about all the new social glories that awaited at Cushing Academy, where Blake was already set to escort her to her senior prom.

Back at Cushing, however, things were not quite as Bette had hoped or expected. Under pressure from the school administration, she reluctantly agreed to work as a waitress in the cafeteria to help pay her expenses. And while she eagerly accepted the praise of friends like Jim Allen, who wrote from Harvard to congratulate her for trying to assist Ruthie, Bette was in fact mortified at having to advertise her dire financial circumstances to fellow students. New humiliation followed when she ran for president of the senior class. Bette received only a single vote, her own: a blow rendered all the more painful by the principal's having read the results aloud in the auditorium. But the worst did not come until mid-October when, after escorting Bette to the Cushing-Worcester Academy football game, Blake suddenly threw her over for a girl named Marion, with whom he decided to attend the senior prom instead of Bette. Blake's unexpected rejection was a chastening experience, and Bette's arrogant self-confidence seemed to evaporate overnight. The boys whose affections she loved to toy with weren't supposed to reject her as Harlow had. It was almost with a sigh of relief that at Thanks-

giving break Bette contracted measles, which would keep her out of school for the rest of the term.

Things were scarcely any better for her in Newton. Bette's girlfriends there were all excitedly planning for college. Sister Koops would soon be going off to Skidmore and Miggie Fitts to Mount Holyoke. College, however, was a possibility that even the self-sacrificing Ruthie could hardly consider for Bette on her erratic earnings as a photographer and the $200 monthly alimony she continued to receive from Harlow. More than ever, as Bette made the rounds of Christmas parties in Newton, including a dance at the Neighborhood Club given by Sister Koops and her older sister Doris, she lamented a fate that had robbed her of all she would have possessed had Ruthie not been so foolish as to lose Harlow to another woman.

It was in this frame of mind that, on January 5, 1926 (six days after Sister Koops's party), Bette accompanied Ruthie to the Blanche Yurka production of Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck at the Repertory Theatre of Boston: an experience she would later credit with having inspired her to become an actress. In The Lonely Life, Davis recalls the powerful identification she felt with the English actress Peg Entwistle in the role of Hedvig. "I was watching myself," Davis would write. "There wasn't an emotion I didn't anticipate or share with her.'' But beyond saying that she was ' 'thrilled'' by Entwistle's performance, Bette offers no clue to precisely what it was in The Wild Duck that stirred her. More useftil is the theater program she preserved from that momentous day. Even before the curtain went up, if Bette read George Bernard Shaw's "Analysis of the Play," Shaw's references to the Ekdal family—to the mother Gina's "photographic work," the father Hjalmar's feelings of intellectual superiority to his wife and his subsequent abandonment of her and their teenage daughter, Hedvig—can only have struck a strange and disturbing chord. Whether Bette read the Shaw text in her program we cannot know; but knowing what we do of her life to this point, it is possible to imagine the powerful sense of recognition she must have felt when the curtain went up on a set littered with Gina's photographic equipment and camera portraits. In eerie resemblance to Ruthie Davis, Ibsen's Gina Ekdal has studied photography and earns her scant living as a photo retoucher. Like Harlow Davis, Hjalmar Ekdal was once (as another character says) "accepted amongst his fellow students as the great light of the future." Hjalmar's disdain for what he perceives as Gina's dull-wittedness and vulgarity exactly parallels the dynamics between Harlow and Ruthie, whose "inability to share his intellectual life became a

source of irritation' '—as Bette recalls in her memoir, careful to add that she can "understand" her father's impatience with Ruthie's "lesser gifts." Also as in Bette's experience, while the father in Ibsen's 1884 play is presumed to be the superior partner, it is the mother whose labors in the photography studio provide the money on which she and her daughter must live.